Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

It really was inevitable, wasn’t it? Having more or less held their fire throughout Lord Black’s season of “counterterrorism,” the prosecution lashed out last night with 26 pages of blowback. Reasoning from Black’s literally thousands of words aimed at denigrating the proceedings and institutions that brought him to his current state of criminal conviction, prosecutor Eric Sussman asked Amy St. Eve to turn up the volume on Black’s sentence to 11. Black insists he did “absolutely nothing wrong” and that he has been “unjustly convicted,” writes Sussman. “Indeed, Black’s conduct makes clear that he would engage in the very same conduct again if given the opportunity… To this day, Black maintains his offences of conviction were ‘rubbish’ and ‘nonsense.’” All this, the prosecutor concludes, is simply further evidence of Black’s “stunning lack of remorse.” Well, yes, that’s the point, isn’t it? And while I’m sure that St. Eve, in setting the sentence, will bend over backwards to ensure that her reasoning rises above the fray, none of this can possibly help to mitigate the damage.

Some time ago, I had lunch with Nick Stein, who wrote the piece on Black for Men’s Vogue. Much of his reporting was based on long e-mails Black wrote in response to a series of questions about the trial. Stein knew he was sitting on dynamite and mused aloud that he hoped Black’s more acidic comments didn’t put him in any more Dutch than was already the case. Just then, he kind of shrugged and took an expression indicating, without saying it, “What are you gonna do? The guy made his own bed.” Come December 10, he’ll have to lie in it.